In the 24th century, graphical controls housed underneath touch-sensitive clear panels allowed LCARS panels to be quickly reconfigured by users to suit the task at hand, including a tactile interface for visually-impaired officers. (VOY: "Year of Hell") This enabled even complicated tasks to be executed with just a few button presses. LCARS also controlled the retrieval and storage of files in the data banks housed within the ship's computer cores.

Depending on the starship, the LCARS design, especially the color scheme, differed. These colors could range from a yellow/white (found on the USS Enterprise-D) to blue/white scheme (found on the USS Enterprise-E).

A close-up view of one of the science stations aboard the Enterprise-D in "The Vengeance Factor" has the label "Library Computer Subsystems". [1]

LCARS are seen in almost every episode of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. The interfaces seen in The Original Series and Enterprise are never named and their designs are quite different.

According to a Next Generation episode text commentary by Michael and Denise Okuda, the LCARS displays were rarely actual computer simulations; one such example was the computer screen used by Romulan Commander Sela to monitor the Federation fleet during her attempt to smuggle weapons and supplies to Lursa and B'Etor during the Klingon civil war in the episode "Redemption II". This was due, according to the Okudas, to both the high cost and primitive state of computer graphics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Therefore, most LCARS displays were, in fact, plastic panels with spinning light devices behind them to give the impression that the information on the "displays" was changing.

The full name "Library Computer Access and Retrieval System" can be seen in several episodes, including "The Price".

In the first two seasons of The Next Generation, large black rectangles are clearly visible on the LCARS displays on the bridge (and sometimes in main engineering). This was a result of the studio lights reflecting off the displays, which director of photography Edward R. Brown tried to solve by sticking cardboard onto them. When Brown was replaced by Marvin V. Rush for the third season, a number of changes in filming (including better film stock and a smaller number of lights) allowed the LCARS displays to be seen properly. [2]